America
as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives
as New Beginnings
by David E. Nye
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2003
381 pp., illus. Trade, $29.95
ISBN: 0-262-14081-0.
Reviewed by Michael Punt
Metatechnology Research
mpunt@easynet.co.uk
Thanks to
the popularisers of science, during the
past decade, a fascination with cosmology
has led to a widespread rejection of simple
causalityat least as far as
the formation of the Universe is concerned.
Arguably, what might be called high
science is not only seen as a speculative
inquiry but is more and more regarded
as a branch of philosophy. Perhaps this
should make it all the more surprising
that despite the best efforts of a generation
of solid research and publishing, there
is almost without exception a general
(and sadly even academic) acceptance of
the notion that technology has agency.
Somehow the heavens and all that follows
are understood as contingent and even
accidental, but the latest memory upgrade,
smart bomb, or faster car are regarded
as an autonomous product of technology.
Often masked with the idea of progress,
evolution, or development, invariably
technology is described as not only being
out of control but also as
a determining force in culture. Why such
an absurd and unsustainable idea is so
persistent becomes clear if one asks in
whose interest it is to promote technological
determinism. With its historical selectivity
and implicit consumer passivity it is
obvious that financial interests are best
served if the determining power of users
is eliminated from the question of how
and why technology changes.
David Nye is one of the most consistent
and articulate exponents of an alternative
view of how technology and culture interact.
For over two decades he has looked at
he way that, in North American in particular,
technological determinism cannot account
for the ways that human inventiveness
produced new things in the universe that
intervened in its fundamental operations.
America as the Second Creation
represents the most sophisticated and
refined articulation of the idea that
technology is a narrative element in the
stories that we tell ourselves. Axes,
mills, canals, and irrigation may appear
to have been the products of a material
necessity, but among all the possible
resolutions to the problem of sustainable
expansion, these had a privileged emergence
because they were viable tokens in an
elaborate narrative of America as a new
Eden.
What is especially significant about America
as Second Creation, and Nyes
work generally, is that it supports its
thesis with painstakingly researched evidence
of the human imagination as it is expressed
in the arts. Literature, painting, and
scientific speculation are regarded as
sustainable evidence of an imaginary reality
that technology was invented
to support. The arts are also seen as
the site of the skeptical unconscious
that technological growth triggered in
the more conservative thinkers. In particular,
a brilliant section on Henry Adams draws
on his writing to illustrate the key oppositions
that nineteenth century America had to
reconcile into a coherent whole. In particular
his profound pessimism arises from the
very existence of historical awareness.
Adams historical revision was stimulated
by the realisation that progress was irreconcilable
with the idea that entropy was the unavoidable
consequence of the transformation of energy.
A careful examination of the discourses
(or sustaining narratives) of science
and technology shows how the investment
in a simple (and distorted notion of evolution)
sublimated that anxiety by replacing energy
with force in the narrative. The impact
of this displacement on the forms of technology
that were favoured carried with them political
and philosophical implications that Adams
gave most voice to in his polemical
The Education of Henry Adams. Nye
argues that, convinced that there had
been a fundamental break in history in
his lifetime, Adams attempted to develop
a new history in order to reconcile evolution
with the laws of thermodynamics. In Nyes
argument, the driving force behind some
of the technologies that drew Thomas Edisons
interest was a belief that somehow technology
would overcome the tendency toward entropy
by stimulating mental growth.
America As Second Creation is,
of course, essential reading for anyone
who thinks about technology at all; it
is also a pleasure to be in the presence
of a scholar who wears his knowledge so
lightly. It also raises interesting methodological
questions concerning our own sustaining
narrativesespecially history.
In particular, how we can harbour an idea
of the cosmos as a vast engine that is
steadily winding down from its dramatic
initiation, and how we can subscribe in
the belief that technology is driven by
progressive forces so powerful that in
the future all our problems will be solvedeven
the collapsing universe? Understanding
technology has not been in the forefront
of much cultural analysis; it is a largely
under-published academic study. Populist
and some academic key text subscribe to
a simple causality that ultimately fails
to explain the particularity of any technological
solution or its changing interpretation
in the hands of enthusiastic and skeptical
communities. Yet as Nyes work make
clear, understanding technology as archaeological
evidence of the reconciliation of profound
contradictions that historical awareness
provokes may provide a key to understanding
history itself.